Unity A Core Value As Long As Everyone Unifies Behind *You*

If unity requires you to set your agenda aside, then to hell with unity.

Jerusalem, August 9 – Israel’s fractured politics calls for a party and candidate who can bridge the rifts that have condemned numerous consecutive governments to short-lived, unstable coalitions rife with conflict, provided the bridging takes place with your favored party or figure at the helm, a new study has determined.

Political scientists and authorities on government and society confirmed what you have long assumed, namely that unity takes precedence over other values only when other parties or people must compromise on their values to achieve that unity, while you get to give your legislative and policy agenda priority and others must unite behind you because unity. If, however, unity requires you to set your agenda aside, then to hell with unity.

The phenomenon comes into sharp focus in the approach to another round of parliamentary elections this November, following just over a year of “unity” under one of the country’s least-popular and least-accomplished prime ministers in history Naftali Bennett. Several parties with stark differences in values and policy goals set aside those differences for the sake of sidelining erstwhile incumbent Binyamin Netanyahu, and numbers among its accomplishments the inclusion, for the first time, of an Arab party in the governing coalition. In terms of legislative achievements, the coalition produced a less-impressive record as its constituent parties pulled and pushed in disparate directions that ultimately tore the government apart.

Unity for its own sake failed in this case to keep the disparate parties from fracturing the coalition; that fact underlines the importance of subordinating, even negating, the disparate values within a coalition to one dominant figure. Even the seemingly-dominant Netanyahu in his multiple terms as premier failed to achieve that, resulting in multiple election cycles and short-lived governments that have become the rule, rather than the exception, in Israeli politics since the 1980’s. Experts stressed that this time, however, things will be different if constituent parties more thoroughly suppress or set aside everything they stand for and their voters want, in the name of unity under your favored set of policies. Uniting behind the policies of someone other than you or your favored party, however, will only bring further discord and condemn Israel to further rounds of futile elections in which no faction can cobble together a convincing legislative majority.

Alternatively, the experts suggested, a miracle might occur in which those who disagree with you will come to their senses and realize how wrong the are not to share your priorities.

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